Burning Bright

by Ron Rash

  THE WOMAN WHO BELIEVED IN JAGUARS

  On the drive home from her mother’s funeral, Ruth Lealand thinks of jaguars.

  She saw one once in the Atlanta Zoo and admired the creature’s movements—like muscled water—as it paced back and forth, turning inches from the iron bars but never acknowledging the cage’s existence. She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface, a memory from the third grade. Mrs. Carter tells them to get out their History of South Carolina text-books. Paper and books shuffle and shift. Some of the boys snicker, for on the book’s first page is a drawing of an Indian woman suckling her child. Ruth opens the book and sees a black-and-white sketch of a jaguar, but for only a moment, because this is not a page they will study today or any other day this school year. She turns to the correct page and forgets what she’s seen for fifty years.

  But now as she drives west toward Columbia, Ruth again sees the jaguar and the palmetto trees it walks through. She wonders why in the intervening decades she has never read or heard anyone else mention that jaguars once roamed South Carolina. Windows up, radio off, Ruth travels in silence. The last few days were made more wearying because she’s had to converse with so many people. She is an only child, her early life long silences filled with books and games that needed no other players. That had been the hardest adjustment in her marriage—the constant presence of Richard, though she’d come to love the cluttered intimacy of their shared life, the reassurance and promise of “I’m here” and “I’ll be back.” Now a whole day can pass without her speaking a word to another person.

  In her apartment for the first time in three days, Ruth drops her mail on the bed, then hangs up the black dress, nudges the shoes back into the closet’s far corner. She glances through the bills and advertisements, but stops, as she always does, when she sees the flyer of a missing child. She studies the boy’s face, ignoring the gapped smile. If she were to see him, he would not be smiling. Her lips move slightly as she reads of a child four feet tall and eighty pounds, a boy with blond hair and blue eyes last seen in Charlotte. Not so far away, she thinks, and places it in a pocketbook already holding a dozen similar flyers.

  No pastel sympathy cards brighten her mail. A personal matter, Ruth had told her supervisor, and out of deference or indifference the supervisor hadn’t asked her to explain further. Though Ruth’s worked in the office sixteen years, her coworkers know nothing about her. They do not know she was once married, once had a child. At Christmas the people she works with draw names, and every year she receives a sampler of cheeses and meats. She imagines the giver buying one for her and one for some maiden aunt. There are days at the office when Ruth feels invisible. Coworkers look right through her as they pass her desk. She believes that if she actually did disappear and the police needed an artist’s sketch, none of them could provide a distinguishing detail.

  Ruth walks into the living room, kneels in front of the set of encyclopedias on the bottom bookshelf. When she was pregnant, her mother insisted on making a trip to Columbia to bring a shiny new stroller, huge discount bags of diapers, and the encyclopedias bought years ago for Ruth.

  They’re for your child now, her mother had said. That’s why I saved them.

  But Ruth’s child lived only four hours. She was still hazy from the anesthesia when Richard had sat on the hospital bed, his face pale and haggard, and told her they had lost the baby. In her drugged mind she envisioned a child in the new stroller, wheeled into some rarely used hospital hallway and then forgotten.

  Tell them they have to find him, she’d said, and tried to get up, propping herself on her elbows for a moment before they gave way and darkness closed around her.

  Richard had wanted to try again. We’ve got to move on with our lives, he’d said. But she’d taken the stroller and bags of diapers to Goodwill. In the end only Richard moved on, taking a job in Atlanta. Soon they were seeing each other on fewer and fewer weekends, solitude returning to her life like a geographical place, a landscape neither hostile nor welcoming, just familiar.

  That their marriage had come apart was not unusual. All the books and advice columnists said so. Their marriage had become a tangled exchange of sorrow. Ruth knew now that it had been she, not Richard, who too easily had acquiesced to the idea that it always would be so, that solitude was better because it allowed no mirror for one’s grief. They could have had another child, could have tried to heal themselves. She’d been the unwilling one.

  Ruth rubs her index finger over the encyclopedia spines, reading the time-darkened letters like braille. She pulls the J volume out, a cracking sound as she opens it. She finds the entry, a black-and-white photograph of a big cat resting in a tree: Range: South and Central America. Once found in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, but now only rare sightings near the U.S.-Mexico border.

  There is no mention of South Carolina, not even Florida. Ruth wonders for the first time if perhaps she only imagined seeing the jaguar in the schoolbook. Perhaps it was a mountain lion or bobcat. She shelves the encyclopedia and turns on her computer, types jaguar South Carolina extinct into the search engine. After an hour, Ruth has found three references to Southeast United States and several more to Florida and Louisiana, but no reference to South Carolina. She walks into the kitchen and opens the phone book. She calls the state zoo’s main number and asks to speak to the director.

  “He’s not here today,” the switchboard operator answers, “but I can connect you to his assistant, Dr. Timrod.”

  The phone rings twice and a man’s voice answers.

  Ruth is unsure how to say what she wants, unsure of what it is that she wants, other than some kind of confirmation. She tells her name and that she’s interested in jaguars.

  “We have no jaguar,” Dr. Timrod says brusquely. “The closest would be in Atlanta.”

  Ruth asks if they were ever in South Carolina.

  “In a zoo?”

  “No, in the wild.”

  “I’ve never heard that,” Dr. Timrod says. “I associate jaguars with a more tropical environment, but I’m no expert on big cats.” His voice is reflective now, more curious than impatient. “My field is ornithology. Most people think parakeets are tropical too, but once they were in South Carolina.”

  “So it’s possible,” Ruth says.

  “Yes, I guess it’s possible. I do know buffalo were here. Elk, pumas, wolves. Why not a jaguar.”

  “Could you help me find out?”

  As Dr. Timrod pauses, she imagines his office—posters of animals on the walls, the floor concrete just like the big cats’ cages. Maybe a file cabinet and bookshelves but little else. She suspects the room reeks of pipe smoke.

  “Maybe,” Dr. Timrod says. “I can ask Leslie Winters. She’s our large animal expert, though elephants are her main interest. If she doesn’t know, I’ll try to do a little research on it myself.”

  “Can I come by the zoo tomorrow to see what you’ve found?”

  Dr. Timrod laughs. “You’re rather persistent.”

  “Not usually,” Ruth says.

  “I’ll be in my office from ten to eleven. Come then.”

  Ruth calls her office and tells the secretary she will be out one more day.

  The needs of the dead have exhausted her. Too tired to cook or go out, Ruth instead finishes unpacking and takes a long bath. As she lies in the warm, neck-deep water, she closes her eyes and summons the drawing of the jaguar. She tries to remember more. Was the jaguar drawn as if moving or standing still? Were its eyes looking toward her or toward the end of the page? Were there parakeets perched in the palmetto trees above? She cannot recall.

  Ruth does not rest well that night. She has trouble falling asleep and when she finally does she dreams of rows of bleached tombstones with no names, no dates etched upon them. In the dream one of these tombstones marks the grave of her son, but she does not know which one.

  Driving through rush-hour traffic
the next morning, Ruth remembers how she made the nurse bring her son to her when the drugs had worn off enough that she understood what lost really meant. She’d looked into her child’s face so she might never forget it, stroking the wisps of hair blond and fine as corn silk. Her son’s eyes were closed. After a few seconds the nurse had gently but firmly taken the child from her arms. The nurse had been kind, as had the doctor, but she knows they have forgotten her child by now, that his brief life has merged with hundreds of other children who lived and died under their watch. She knows that only two people remember that child and that now even she has trouble recalling what he looked like and the same must be true for Richard. She knows there is not a single soul on earth who could tell her the color of her son’s eyes.

  At the zoo the next day, the woman in the admission booth gives Ruth a map, marking Dr. Timrod’s office with an X.

  “You’ll have to go through part of the zoo, so here’s a pass,” the woman says, “just in case someone asks.”

  Ruth accepts the pass but opens her pocketbook. “I may stay a while.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” the woman says and waves her in.

  Ruth follows the map past the black rhino and the elephants, past the lost-and-found booth where the Broad River flows only a few yards from the concrete path. She walks over a wooden bridge and finds the office, a brick building next to the aviary.

  Ruth is twenty minutes early so sits down on a nearby bench, light-headed with fatigue though she hasn’t walked more than a quarter mile, all of it downhill. On the other side of the walkway a wire-mesh cage looms large as her living room. THE ANDEAN CONDOR IS THE LARGEST FLYING BIRD IN THE WORLD. LIKE ITS AMERICAN RELATIVES, VULTUR GRYPHUS IS VOICELESS, the sign on the cage says.

  The condor perches on a blunt-limbed tree, its head and neck thick with wrinkles. When the bird spreads its wings, Ruth wonders how the cage can contain it. She lowers her gaze, watches instead the people who pass in front of her. Her stomach clenches, and she realizes she hasn’t eaten since lunchtime yesterday.

  She is about to go find a refreshment stand when she sees the child. A woman dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt drags him along as if a prisoner, their wrists connected by a cord of white plastic. As they pass between her and the condor, Ruth stares intently at the blue eyes and blond hair, the pale unsmiling face. She estimates his height and weight as she fumbles with her pocketbook snap, sifts through the flyers till she finds the one she’s searching for. She looks and knows it is him. She snaps the pocketbook shut as the woman and child cross the wooden bridge.

  Ruth rises to follow and the world suddenly blurs. The wire mesh of the condor’s cage wavers as if about to give way. She grips the bench with her free hand. In a few moments she regains her balance, but the woman and child are out of sight.

  Ruth walks rapidly, then is running, the pocketbook slapping against her side, the flyer gripped in her hand like a sprinter’s baton. She crosses the wooden bridge and finally spots the woman and child in front of the black rhino’s enclosure.

  “Call the police,” Ruth says to the teenager in the lost-and-found booth. “That child,” she says, gasping for breath as she points to the boy, “that child has been kidnapped. Hurry, they’re about to leave.”

  The teenager looks at her incredulously, but he picks up the phone and asks for security. Ruth walks past the woman and child, putting herself between them and the park’s exit. She does not know what she will say or do, only that she will not let them pass by her.

  But the woman and child do not try to leave, and soon Ruth sees the teenager with two gray-clad security guards, guns holstered on their hips, jogging toward her.

  “There,” Ruth shouts, pointing as she walks toward the child. As Ruth and the security guards converge, the woman in the blue T-shirt and the child turn to face them.

  “What is this?” the woman asks as the child clutches her leg.

  “Look,” Ruth says, thrusting the flyer into the hands of the older of the two men. The security guard looks at it, then at the child.

  “What is this? What are you doing?” the woman asks, her voice frantic now.

  The child is whimpering, still holding the woman’s leg. The security guard looks up from the flyer.

  “I don’t see the resemblance,” he says, looking at Ruth.

  He hands the flyer to his partner.

  “This child would be ten years old,” the younger man says.

  “It’s him,” Ruth says. “I know it is.”

  The older security guard looks at Ruth and then at the woman and child. He seems unsure what to do next.

  “Ma’am,” he finally says to the woman, “if you could show me some ID for you and your child we can clear this up real quick.”

  “You think this isn’t my child?” the woman asks, looking not at the security guards but at Ruth. “Are you insane?”

  The woman shakes as she opens her purse, hands the security guard her driver’s license, photographs of her family, and two Social Security cards.

  “Momma, don’t let them take me away,” the child says, clutching his mother’s knee more tightly.

  The mother places her hand on her son’s head until the older security guard hands her back the cards and pictures.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he says. “I apologize for this.”

  “You should apologize, all of you,” the woman says, lifting the child into her arms.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ruth says, but the woman has already turned and is walking toward the exit.

  The older security guard speaks into a walkie-talkie.

  “I was so sure,” she says to the younger man.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the security guard replies, not meeting her eyes.

  Ruth debates whether to meet her appointment or go home. She finally starts walking toward Dr. Timrod’s office, for no better reason than it is downhill, easier.

  When she knocks on the door, the voice she heard on the phone tells her to come in. Dr. Timrod sits at a big wooden desk. Besides a computer and telephone, there’s nothing on the desk except some papers and a coffee cup filled with pens and pencils. A bookshelf is behind him, the volumes on it thick, some leather bound. The walls are bare except for a framed painting of long-tailed birds perched on a tree limb, their yellow heads and green bodies brightening the tree like Christmas ornaments, Carolina Paroquet emblazoned at the bottom.

  Dr. Timrod’s youth surprises her. Ruth had expected gray hair, bifocals, and a rumpled suit, not jeans and a flannel shirt, a face unlined as a teenager’s. A styrofoam cup fills his right hand.

  “Ms. Lealand, I presume.”

  “Yes,” she says, surprised he remembers her name.

  He motions for her to sit down.

  “Our jaguar hunt cost me a good bit of sleep last night,” he says.

  “I didn’t sleep much myself,” Ruth says. “I’m sorry you didn’t either.”

  “Don’t be. Among other things I found out jaguars tend to be nocturnal. To study a creature it’s best to adapt to its habits.”

  Dr. Timrod sips from the cup. Ruth smells the coffee and again feels the emptiness in her stomach.

  “I talked to Leslie Winters yesterday before I left. She’d never heard of jaguars being in South Carolina, but she reminded me that her main focus is elephants, not cats. I called a friend who’s doing fieldwork on jaguars in Arizona. He told me there’s as much chance of a jaguar having been in South Carolina as a polar bear.”

  “So they were never here,” Ruth says, and she wonders if there is anything left inside her mind she can believe.

  “I’d say that’s still debatable. When I got home last night, I did some searching on the computer. A number of sources said their range once included the Southeast. Several mentioned Florida and Louisiana, a few Mississippi and Alabama.”

  Dr. Timrod pauses and lifts a piece of paper off his desk.

  “Then I found this.”

  He stands up and hands the paper to Ruth. T
he words Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina are underlined.

  “What’s strange is the source is a book published in the early sixties,” Dr. Timrod says. “Not a more contemporary source.”

  “So people just forgot they were here,” Ruth says.

  “Well, it’s not like I did an exhaustive search,” Dr. Timrod says. “And the book that page came from could be wrong. Like I said, it’s not an updated source.”

  “I believe they were here,” Ruth says.

  Dr. Timrod smiles and sips from the styrofoam cup.

  “Now you have some support for your belief.”

  Ruth folds the paper and places it in her purse.

  “I wonder when they disappeared from South Carolina?”

  “I have no idea,” Dr. Timrod says.

  “What about them?” Ruth asks, pointing at the parakeets.

  “Later than you’d think. There were still huge flocks in the mid-1800s. Audubon said that when they foraged the fields looked like brilliantly colored carpets.”

  “What happened?”

  “Farmers didn’t want to share the crops and fruit trees. A farmer with a gun could kill a whole flock in one afternoon.”

  “How was that possible?” Ruth asks.

  “That’s the amazing thing. They wouldn’t abandon one another.”

  Dr. Timrod turns to his bookshelf, takes off a volume, and sits back down. He thumbs through the pages until he finds what he’s looking for.

  “This was written in the 1800s by a man named Alexander Wilson,” Dr. Timrod says, and begins to read. “‘Having shot down a number, some of which were only wounded, the whole flock swept repeatedly around their prostrate companions, and again settled on a low tree, within twenty yards of the spot where I stood. At each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted near me.’”